Realistic Angry Birds is an image macro meme involving hyperrealistic depictions of characters from the popular early-2010s mobile game franchise Angry Birds, often with prominent grimaces on their faces, combined with absurd and/or scatological captions. Since April 2021, these memes have been used in shitposting on sites such as Twitter.

Origin

The images were originally commissioned for and created by New York-based artist Sam Spratt. According to the Angry Birds Wiki, Sam Spratt's first foray into realistic depictions of Angry Birds characters was his painting "Pig In The Dark" in 2011, which went viral on the Internet and received attention from sites such as Kotaku. Seeing the attention, Angry Birds developer Rovio contacted Spratt around 2012 and commissioned several other realistic depictions of Angry Birds characters, including the majority of bird protagonists at the time and two pigs. The images were also used in the game Angry Birds 2 as unlockable profile photos.

Spread

At some point around April 2021, the images started receiving widespread attention on Twitter as a potential source for shitposts. On April 23, popular meme page @ImagesEv requested Angry Birds memes to be sent to them.